Six Benefits of Virtual Servers

January 29, 2014
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Six Benefits of Virtual Servers

Setting up a physical server environment can be a gruesome task as it amounts to large capital investment and labor. Moreover, it also needs constant maintenance which does not reduce the cost in any way ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ rather increases it. For a large enterprise where physical multi-server setup is essential to conduct businesses, they have to adopt the same. But for those organizations where setup cost brings added burden, virtualization is just perfect for them. Virtualization of server refers to a situation where one does not need to setup physical servers but rather access a set of virtual servers to perform daily operations.

Most of the servers usually stay in idle mode (though not constant for all cases) and incurs huge electricity cost and heat. This is the main reason why server rooms are built separately to implement cooling agent and structured cabling. Even at times when the existing server goes full one has to opt for installation of another server which is evidently cost-intensive.

Compared to setting up a physical environment choosing virtualization, therefore, seems more beneficial. In fact, this now has become a standard for various organizations to reduce the overall expenditure in this fractured economy.

The process to choose a virtualization server follows the same approach when choosing a physical server. Following are the preliminary factors one has to take in account during selection:

Once all the aforesaid conditions are met, the next final step is to choose virtualization software. There is different virtualization software available compatible with different operating systems like Linux or Windows. Some of them are available free as open-source while others can be acquired on the purchase. One most widely accepted virtualization tool is VMware available for Linux and Windows Operating System family. The basic difference between open-source and paid software is in the availability of features. However, that is not valid for all cases. For instance, Citrix provides free downloads of their tool XenServer which comes with a pack of rich features and one purchase additional license to avail other benefits such patch updates, access to customer support and accessing the knowledge base. Microsoft also has their virtualization software named Hyper-V specifically designed for windows based system.

However to conclude here lies some of the benefits behind virtualization:

It is easy to experiment in virtualization. By capturing a snapshot of the virtual server, one can perform various experimentations. In the case the server goes wrong, simply rolling back the snapshot will end up retrieving the last known good configuration.

Depletes the idea to rely on one hardware vendor.

Uptime rate is drastically increased since virtualization servers are built with hi-end technology to keep the server running.

To conclude, the coming of virtualization technology is rapidly changing the scenario. Organizations are planning diligently to invest more on virtualization and treat the same as an effective standard in defining a cost-effective server environment.